I have created a custom today page with several gadgets, mostly measure gauges. When I invoke my preferences to change my current today page to this view, I am receiving the error "The gadget class has changed, contact the PMF administrator".

My questions are: What causes this to occur?, and how is it resolved?

I know it's not the case, but due to my lack of understanding of the behavior of this piece of the software it appears to happen randomly.

Thank you in advance.

PMF 5.1.1

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Bob Jude Ferrante,

This means that the parm interface for the gadget(s) differs from what's been configured. We'll try to explain what that means in plain English.

A gadget has a definition (in earlier PMF we called it a "class") which defines the parameters it can prompt for. Parameters are things like "user specified dimension" and "measure" and specifies things like "it can handle multiple selections" or "it only wants one" or "it likes Time to be the outside grouping (grouping = sort with aggregation)." etc. These things are universal - they are the same for that gadget at every site.

A gadget also has a user setting for these parameters. They are site dependent because one site might have a Location dimension and another might have a Geography dimension and no Location dimension. They also will have different scorecards, different measures. Different everything.

So for "user specified dimension" you might have something like "Location" if the site has a Location dimension. These are set up as A) defaults, specific to each scorecard and dashboard as configured at each site. B) User-specific. Users can override the defaults to THEIR preferences.

So the "out of sync" condition means one of two things has happened:

1) You added a new scorecard to the system and didn't set default parms for the gadget. It's not your fault - you're allowed to add them!
Or PMF's. Although PMF can "magically" figure out and configure gadgets to look for available measures, this won't work at the moment you add a new Scorecard. At the time a scorecard is added, there are usually no measures and measure data available for the magical stuff to figure it out. So you have to initiate that process when the scorecard is ready for Magic.

2) Custom Gadgets were reconfigured so the current user-level parm settings and/or default settings as stored for all dashboards and scorecards aren't matching up.
You changed parms for a gadget and didn't "reset all" parms.

In both cases the same remedy applies: use Magic. Magic is PMF's \"reset parms" function, which is available on the dashboard designer (or the "dashboard page designer" if you're using earlier than current PMF). Have a look at "Resetting Dashboard Gadget Default Preferences" in the New Features doc for 5.1, or in the main PMF doc in 5.2. In the second case above, where you actually changed the gadget's parm interface (usually for a custom gadget), additionally you would want to clear any existing user preferences for that gadget, because they might be in the wrong order, etc. In 5.1 this is a bit tedious because you have to go to the Designer for each dashboard, select the new scorecard, and tell it to run Magic. This operation can take 5-10 minutes (that's what we mean by "tedious").

In 5.2.2, this is expanded to let you reset defaults on the scorecard itself, across all dashboards, so it's a one-click operation. When the scorecard has enough data for magic, you can just go to the scorecard in the Author tab and check "reset all parameters" and/or "clear all user preferences" and then Save. One click and it's all done. 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes.

Hope this explains things clearly enough to be useful. Gadgets are rich and do a lot for you but there are still some things you have to do to keep them fed and happy.

thanks

Thank you Bob for the thorough explanation, I was able to perform the operation and correct the problem.

PMF 5.1.1